Gorilla Marketing Makes Guster Feel Less Than Festvive About Rockfest

July 31, 2000|By Greg Kot, Tribune rock critic.

Blame the guys in the gorilla masks.

The quote from the promoter declaring the concert "a national platform for corporate sponsors to market their products" didn't sit right with Guster singer Ryan Miller. The video screen the size of a five-story high-rise behind the stage that broadcast TV commercials made him feel even worse. But it was the simian-faced fellas firing a car manufacturer's T-shirts into the crowd that convinced Miller that he and his band had made a terrible mistake when they agreed to perform at the Hard Rock Cafe Rockfest, which took place July 22 at the Chicago Motor Speedway in Cicero.

"Something snapped," Miller says, and he took every opportunity during Guster's 40-minute set to jab at what he saw as corporate sponsorship run amok. He mispronounced the name of the $6 million festival's primary sponsor, Oldsmobile Alero, and he mockingly shouted the car manufacturer's slogan. When it was over, angry promoters refused to pay the band the remaining half of its $10,000 performance fee; Guster retaliated by detailing the day's events on its Web site and turning its defiance into a national cause celebre; and both sides ended up calling each other hypocrites.

"If you want to be indie-rock cool, then you shouldn't accept a check for $5,000 to play a festival called `Hard Rock Cafe Rockfest brought to you by Oldsmobile,'" said Michele Bernstein, the Hard Rock executive who booked Guster and 11 other bands on the festival, including Metallica, Kid Rock and Stone Temple Pilots.

"When their video airs on MTV, there are commercials on before and after," said Chris Tomasso, executive producer of Rockfest. "Maybe they should boycott MTV as well."

Guster found it preposterous that they were penalized for tweaking an overly zealous corporate sponsor while one of the festival's other performers, Kid Rock, was paid in full for an act that included bikini-clad go-go dancers and a lengthy homage to kinky sex. "Kid Rock talks about that stuff and they said, `Great job, you spoke to your demographic, here's your money,'" Miller says. "I mispronounce the name of a car, call everyone's attention to how we are being marketed, and they tell us, `There is no way we are paying you.'"

At a time when corporate sponsorship has become the norm at major rock events, and rock performers both new and old routinely license their songs to advertisers, Guster's combative comments at Rockfest have momentarily jostled a culture that has grown numb to how completely the relationship between art and commerce has been corrupted.

But the Guster-Rockfest standoff isn't simply a case of a rebellious rock 'n' roll David taking on the big bad corporate Goliath. Guster has a recording contract with Sire Records, which is owned by Time-Warner, and has a song-publishing deal with another corporate behemoth, Universal-Polygram. The Boston trio has played many previous corporate-sponsored festivals without once raising a fuss, and it is considering accepting a corporate sponsorship to help it defray the costs of a fall tour.

"We played a free corporate-sponsored show in Nashville recently, and we were subjected to an AT&T banner across the stage the whole time," Miller says. "But we played to 5,000 people, which is five times as many as we normally would reach in Nashville, and that was OK with us. My royalty checks are signed by one of the biggest corporations in the world. This is not a tear-down-the-industry trip I am on. I'm not fighting the system because I'm part of the system."

It's not the concept of a sponsor marketing its product that concerns Miller, it's the intelligence -- or lack of -- with which it is executed.

He cited Volkswagen commercials incorporating rock songs such as Trio's "Da-Da-Da" as an example of marketing "that doesn't insult my intelligence. They're speaking my language. But we have to play music right after a bunch of guys in red jump suits wearing monkey masks hawk T-shirts? That is just dumb, asinine. Between that and the commercials on the big screen, it was the most over-the-top, aggressive sponsorship I'd ever seen. I wanted to tell Oldsmobile, `Market if you like, but not like that.'"

To Bernstein, Guster's impromptu comments skewering Oldsmobile from the stage were nothing short of a self-serving betrayal. Even Miller acknowledges that Bernstein fought to get the band on the Rockfest bill and then wouldn't budge when music executives tried to force Guster to play earlier in the day to a smaller crowd to accommodate a hotter, up-and-coming band, Nine Days.

The night before the show, at the Hard Rock Cafe on Ontario Street, Miller and Bernstein exchanged pleasantries at a party welcoming the bands. "For three hours the band was rubbing shoulders with the very people they attacked on stage the next day," Bernstein said.